(*For those unfamiliar with it, the hand jive was a dance from the 1950s involving "a complicated pattern of hand moves." It brings to mind some of the elaborate manual maneuvers we make in preparing a tarot deck for a reading.) Last night I was reading Paul Huson's Mystical Origins of the Tarot and reached … Continue reading Hand Jive*
Tarot Opinion
“Read ‘Em and Weep”
If your experience is similar to mine, you've most likely encountered reading situations where the cards drawn are so wildly at variance with the context of the question that you're hard-pressed to meet your professional obligation of giving your sitters something meaningful to work with. As you strive to salvage your credibility, it can seem … Continue reading “Read ‘Em and Weep”
Predicting the Future: Prescience or Self-Projection?
There is a strong sentiment among experienced diviners that "fortune-telling" of the flatly predictive variety - while it is not exactly denounced - is an impractical and unreliable pursuit, for a couple of reasons: 1) the future is a moving target and can change regularly based on intervening circumstances not always of our own making … Continue reading Predicting the Future: Prescience or Self-Projection?
The Man Behind the Curtain
In The Wizard of Oz, Frank Morgan as the Wizard thundered at Dorothy and her companions, "Pay no attention to that man behind the curtain!" If memory serves (it's been a few years since I read the book), in his "master class" material Paul Fenton-Smith mentions that he treats a reversed card in a tarot … Continue reading The Man Behind the Curtain
The Devil’s Due
A very long time ago when I first began working with the Thoth deck, I encountered the idea that the Devil card brings enormous physical energy and creativity to the subject of a reading (even if Crowley did inevitably characterize it as procreative or at any rate sexual). This seemed like a more useful take … Continue reading The Devil’s Due
Tore Down
Texas bluesman Freddie King once wrote a song titled Tore Down with the refrain "I'm tore down, almost level with the ground." This is a near-perfect expression of the customary take on the Tower card when it appears in a reading: a cautionary glimpse at some kind of calamitous "accident waiting to happen." In my … Continue reading Tore Down
The “Pernt” and the “Cherce”
I must be getting really desperate if I'm resorting to "Archie-Bunker-isms" for my post titles; for the culturally uninitiated, it reads "The Point and the Choice." What I'm referring to, of course, is the key point (goal, not location) in our approach to divining with the tarot cards and the choices we make in their … Continue reading The “Pernt” and the “Cherce”
A Long Way from Home
Or maybe I'm just waxing nostalgic? (Curmudgeon alert: incoming attitude!) At any rate, I'm no fan of what is apparently being touted as the emergence of a "New Tarot," a description I'd never heard until last week. (It's not a deck, it sounds more like a "cultural movement.") The gist of it seems to be … Continue reading A Long Way from Home
The Star Effect (aka “The Bubble”)
In a brief essay about his aphorism "Every man and woman is a star," Aleister Crowley made the point that it's physically impossible to stand in someone else's shoes at the same instant in time and look at the world from exactly the same perspective; thus, each of us inhabits a private universe of which … Continue reading The Star Effect (aka “The Bubble”)
Chord Changes
File this one under "How Stuff Works." I'm a firm believer in the assumption that very little that is truly definitive in life happens by sheer coincidence, or in complete isolation; formative impulses and nascent events crowd the background of our personal drama, waiting to be propelled into prominence by invitation (ours or others) or … Continue reading Chord Changes
Parsifal's Wheel Tarot & Astrology 